Database

The charter of the Database Group at Microsoft Research Redmond is to increase the usefulness of database system technology to users by creating, extending, and applying database technology. To that end, we consult with product groups at Microsoft and take part in exploratory research projects in several data management systems topics. See our current projects list for an overview of our active research areas.

The Database group has a long tradition of building systems as part of our research. Several of our projects have contributed major technical innovations to Microsoft products. Examples include the Hekaton main-memory OLTP engine, SQL Server Apollo column storage, and the StreamInsight event processing system.

Selected Professional Activities

We actively participate in the database research community. Current activities include the following Conferences activities, and Editorships and Board Memberships:

Justin Levandoski, David Lomet, Sudipta Sengupta,
in Proceedings of the International Conference on Very Large Databases, VLDB 2013,
VLDB – Very Large Data Bases,
August 20, 2013, View abstract, Download PDF

Date

Speakers

Affiliation

Projects

Trill is a high-performance in-memory incremental analytics engine. It can handle both real-time and offline data, and is based on a temporal data and query model. Trill can be used as a streaming engine, a lightweight in-memory relational engine, and as a progressive query processor (for early query results on partial data). You can learn more about Trill from the publications below, or from our slides here pdf | pptx.

In the streams research project, we propose novel architectures, efficient processing techniques, models, and applications to support time-oriented queries over real-time and offline data streams. Our current focus in the project centers around Trill, a high-performance streaming analytics engine that is now used across Microsoft. Our currect focus areas include efficient query processing, scale-out, resiliency, streaming state management, and unstructured data support.

Microsoft Research blog

By Janie Chang In an online, on-demand world, the ability to respond quickly to requests for data has become a significant challenge. Take bwin, for example. In order to attract and retain customers, bwin, the world’s largest regulated online gaming company, must deliver consistently positive user experiences. But the company’s online gaming systems were bottlenecking at about 15,000 requests per second, and adding more hardware was not solving the problem. When Microsoft’s SQL Server team offered…